


Variations on a Theme

by scioscribe



Category: Rope (1948)
Genre: Dysfunctional Relationships, Extra Treat, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-07
Updated: 2017-08-07
Packaged: 2018-12-03 23:14:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11542440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Sometimes when two people love each other, it's really unfortunate.





	Variations on a Theme

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skazka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skazka/gifts).



> Summary straight from this [a softer world strip](http://asofterworld.com/index.php?id=697). It fit too well for me to resist.
> 
> ["Gay Life in 1940s Boston"](https://markthomaskrone.wordpress.com/2014/11/16/gay-life-in-1940s-boston/) mentioned the Statler Hotel in Boston as having a covertly gay-friendly reputation during the war; since there was one in New York too, I stole its Boston reputation to populate Phillip and Brandon's sliver of the demimonde.

Phillip’s wrist itched.

The mosquito bite was the latest evidence on him of Brandon Shaw: the latest and by far the most irritating. (Though also the most inconsequential.) He was sure he’d acquired it in the night, when the weather was at its dampest and the insects were at their most active, their wings a nearly inaudible hum, a constant drone underneath everything Brandon was saying. And somehow only Phillip had gotten bitten. Brandon seemed immune to such things.

“You want to sneak out at night because you’re never the one who gets stung.”

“I want to sneak out at night because I can’t sleep,” Brandon said, which was true, and one of the first things Phillip had noticed about him, one of the first things to make him distinct from one more boy on a wooden schoolroom seat and one more boy on a rigid dormitory bed. He smiled. “Should I kiss it and make it better?”

Brandon never flirted without drawing a veil of irony first, without implying that he knew how silly he was being. One day, Phillip thought, Brandon would get married and say his vows in that exact same tone of voice.

Thinking that made him want to smash something. He said, “Maybe you should.”

But to his surprise, Brandon did, and he didn’t even look around first. They were in the music room, and with the soundproofing on the walls that muddled the acoustics (but protected the ears of the Greek class across the hall), and with Brandon being turned away from the door, someone easily could have come in to practice while they were talking. But there was Brandon, raising the back of Phillip’s wrist to his mouth and pressing his slightly chapped lips against it. Mockingly? No, not entirely.

They had kissed before, of course. Fumblingly—more fumblingly even than they had done other things—but they had done it. This, though, was new, and felt it.

“Play the piano for me,” Brandon said, barely raising up off Phillip’s hand.

Phillip cleared his throat: a small noise swallowed up by the padding on the walls, like someone had pushed a wad of cotton down his mouth and choked him. “What would you like to hear?”

A flush as red as strawberry jam came into Brandon’s face. “‘If I Didn’t Care’?”

It was the most sentimental Phillip had ever seen him and somehow it let the fizz out of the kiss to his hand, like someone had wrenched the cap off a soda bottle. Perhaps Brandon and sentimentality didn’t go together. From him affection sounded like poorly pronounced Italian. Phillip felt a sudden contempt for him—the emperor’s cynicism was only a sham after all and they really were just boys. He wondered how things could go wrong so quickly.

But he did know the song. He put as much feeling into it as he could. Brandon pulled over one of the chairs and sat down in it, listening as raptly as anyone at a professional concert. Phillip thought, _There’s nothing here to worry about_. He felt hollow.

* * *

Brandon’s inability to sleep presented less trouble in college. There were more places to go, though sometimes they went nowhere at all, and when Brandon was restless, Phillip simply woke up long enough to throw the sheet to the side and let Brandon into his bed. The faintest pressure on the crown of Brandon’s head was communication enough for him to lower himself down, where he would take Phillip’s cock in his mouth. At night, insomnia-stricken, Brandon lacked all technique, but that may have been deliberate, sloppiness feigned only to prolong the endeavor and make it more likely to exhaust him.

Phillip became accustomed to waking up in the morning with Brandon beside him, taking up nearly all the whole bed, face half-turned into his pillow, his hair rumpled and his lips still slightly swollen and shiny from his efforts during the night. Looking at him that way, Phillip always felt a mixture of satisfaction and disgust.

He liked better the nights when he was awake too; the nights when Brandon never even tried to sleep.

“Let’s go out,” Brandon would murmur against his jawline. “Let’s find something to drink.” As if they couldn’t have found something right there in the room.

Phillip would always let himself be persuaded. He liked Brandon best when he liked Brandon least, when Brandon was at his least likable, his most manipulative, his most superficial, his most patronizing. Brandon wore all that well, like a suit of clothes. When Phillip fucked other people, it was generally because he caught the barest hint of that self-contained condescension on them, as familiar as the scent of Brandon’s cologne.

One night, they went to the Statler Hotel, which was known to occasionally, flexibly serve past two in the morning, especially on evenings when young, well-dressed men who knew how to properly tip crowded around the bar, flashing their cufflinks and money-clips along with their smiles. Phillip let Brandon pay for their drinks—“It’s your funeral if I order something you don’t like,” Brandon said—because he liked to sit at their table and watch from a distance as Brandon canted forward, teeth-first, and poured out charm like gin.

Brandon came back with two Manhattans, dull but acceptable. “What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“No, you were smiling. I hardly ever see you smile.”

Phillip lifted up his glass; drank just to change the shape of his mouth. “You wouldn’t understand.”

Brandon rolled his eyes. “You’ve become such a bore lately, Phillip.”

“Have I?”

“It’s all our friends have been talking about. They wonder how I can stay with you.”

What a bastard he was, even in play. “And what do you tell them?”

“That you have your good points. That I like your hair—they generally find that believable, less so when I tell them it’s your eyes. Your most significant advantages I leave unspoken from the motive of good taste.”

“And with our friends less acquainted with us?”

“The prudes and the more austere religious set? Whenever we accidentally acquire those, and they rudely come asking, I tell them you’ve always let me copy your Latin homework.”

Phillip laughed and Brandon’s answering smile was stunning.

“I should have,” he said, “you were always mixing up your ablative and accusative prepositions.”

“I enjoyed having my palm smacked with a ruler.”

Phillip thought that it was more that Brandon wasn’t really good at anything other than intelligence itself. It was like he was a prism that light refused to pass through. And he was jealous of talent, Phillip could see it: it was in the way that, after Phillip’s hours of practice, Brandon would sometimes put his fingers in his mouth with the claim that they needed soothing. He would say he could taste the ivory.  Phillip was always waiting to be bitten, always feeling like a lion tamer.

Brandon, not understanding him, intensified his smile. “Finish your drink.”

Phillip finished his drink. In the palatial restroom of the Statler’s lobby, he let Brandon undo his trousers and rub him to an unsteady, leg-shaking climax; Phillip found it easy after that to get down on his knees. He was thankful the doors here went all the way to the floor and less thankful that they were so thin, that there was no deniability at all about what they were doing, about the ferociousness with which he addressed himself to Brandon’s cock.

* * *

It was Phillip’s idea for them to find an apartment together. He instantly regretted it. Brandon had a way of filling up rooms—he was always acquiring eminently tasteful things and bringing them back to Phillip with the pride of a dog dropping a dripping-wet dead bird at his owner's feet. Antique chests and candlesticks and a complete set of encyclopedias.

“God, you’re a cliché,” Phillip said.

“You’re just jealous.”

“Why should I be jealous? It’s our apartment. Whatever you put into it is as much mine as it is yours.”

“That’s a way of looking at the world Locke would never support.” He referred to Locke only because Rupert had made a habit of it, had decried the tyranny of established opinions and remonstrated their bouts of misbehavior with “I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.”

Phillip had never found his actions a particularly good interpreter of anything, let alone something as mercurial as his thoughts, and he had always thought, from the way Rupert looked at him, that Rupert knew that.

He went out walking late that night and bought several old books of sheet music—tripe, most of it, poorly-received operas and early work by composers who’d never gotten around to writing later work. He was in the mood to play something obnoxious and tin-eared, in the mood to spit on his own talent. It always felt slightly like blasphemy, and thinking that it felt like blasphemy always felt even more like blasphemy. He reminded himself that he no longer believed in God except when playing certain pieces to which reverence was essential. It was cold comfort.

Brandon was asleep on the couch—only Brandon could sleep reproachfully, and he could have just fucking gone to bed—but he didn’t let that stop him from flicking on the lights and playing the first piece he flung the book open to.

“Now who’s conventional?” Brandon said, rubbing at his eyes. “Ah, damn, my head. Are you staying or are you going? Staying here or moving out, I mean.”

“I came back, didn’t I?”

“You always do,” Brandon said, complacency restored. He leaned back with his hands laced together behind his head. “Find something more bearable, will you? If you’re going to keep living here, you’ll care about the neighbors’ opinions.”

* * *

On occasion, they would take out girls. Brandon was usually the one who turned them up—he found these college women as fresh as sprigs of mint, as seemingly innocent as lambs and as affectedly tough as black-and-white big-screen baby molls—and the one who insisted that the two of them squire the girls out for drinks, for a “night on the town.” Phillip held his tongue and didn’t point out that the kind of places they went to, nine times out of ten, weren’t the kind that accommodated nice girls. Brandon had some kind of fatalistic wholesomeness to him, though, and would home in on exactly the right spots. Or else he was having more affairs than Phillip realized.

Janet was the only one who lasted very long.

“Oh, I’ve heard her complimenting you on how crisp you keep your bed-sheets,” Phillip said. “Almost like you never sleep in them.”

“Almost like,” Brandon said agreeably, making himself another drink. “She’s a good girl.”

“What would I do,” Phillip said, as if just making conversation, “if I wanted to make you jealous?”

Brandon looked amused. “Do you?”

“Intermittently.”

“That’s very sweet. Do you want me to call things off with her?”

If he said yes, he would be the loser, and he was sick of allowing Brandon such easy victories. “Why should you bother? She’ll throw you over soon enough.”

“Oh, will she?” He kept the same lofty tone, but there was a sharpness underneath it now: the few times Brandon had left bruises on Phillip’s hips, he had sounded just like that. He thought he was the complex one, all patrician elevation, the perfect aesthete who condescended to fuck the chicken farmer’s son, but he was easier to wind up than clockwork. “And why will she do that?”

“You’re not especially satisfying.”

The same continuous smile, only slightly curdled now. “Then why long to make me jealous?”

Because sometimes it was the only way Brandon was interesting.

But it had all curdled for him now, too, so he sighed and held out his hand. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it. Don’t be angry. You can’t blame me for not wanting to see her half in your lap, not wanting to have dinner with her where I pretend it’s not strange to be the third.”

“Well, I didn’t know,” Brandon said, holding Phillip’s hand now, rubbing his thumb across Phillip’s knuckles. He sounded genuinely surprised, as if they had been doing something else for years, instead of loving each other. “You only had to say. She was just a diversion, just camouflage, something to liven things up. Come to bed and I promise to satisfy you quite completely. Come to my bed, even, and we’ll make the sheets a little less immaculate.”

Cooperating seemed easier, and even more enjoyable, than resisting, so he let Brandon take him to bed and spread him out on the sheets, push himself between Phillip’s thighs and make his small, soft Brandon-noises against Phillip’s neck. It was strange that Phillip loved him, but he didn’t remember ever having had a choice in the matter—if he had, surely he would have chosen differently. He put his hands against Brandon’s back. What a disaster he was.

“Of course you wouldn’t understand,” Janet told him later, tearfully. “You’re a much nicer person than Brandon, really.”

Phillip thought of the vicious twist of satisfaction at the bottom of his stomach when he had first seen her take out her handkerchief to blot her eyes; of his exasperation at the way Brandon had kissed the palm of his hand after they had made up. Of the pride he’d had, eight months ago, in letting Rupert fuck him in their bed and then fucking Brandon right in that same spot, Brandon’s knees where Phillip’s own had been just hours before. He was not nicer than Brandon, he was just more of a person than Brandon. On occasion.

* * *

“I’ve been thinking we should do something,” Brandon said.

They were out on the balcony, the sunset in their eyes. Phillip shaded his eyes. “You always do this. You prowl around in the middle of the night and come up with these absurd ideas.”

Brandon lazily kicked across the gap between their chairs and made glancing contact with Phillip’s calf. “You don’t know it’s absurd.”

“We have a long history. I’m very familiar with you.”

In the dying light of the day, Brandon’s answering smile was red-gold, a Midas smile. “Oh? Then what am I thinking?”

An immense shiver ran down Phillip’s body despite the heat, and it was, whatever he would say later, whatever he would think later, delicious—delicious and knowing, the way he had first felt when Brandon had woken him in the night and whispered for him to come outside, when Brandon had first kissed him. The old thrill of sin without apology, without the damper pedal of Brandon’s sticky infatuation or his neediness or the predictability of the Janet affair. Something really exciting, a crescendo.

_Oh, I love you. It’s only for this that I’ve loved you so long._

Phillip said, “You’re thinking something beautiful.”

“Yes,” Brandon said. “A work of art.”


End file.
